On 03/07/2019 17:27, Pancho wrote:
> On 29/06/2019 09:42, James Harris wrote:
>>
>> How, er, fast does it go?
>>
>> With some of the amazing specs of the Raspberry Pi 4 I wonder if the 4GB
version would be fast enough to replace a desktop PC - just for basic computing
such as web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, file handing etc.
>>
>> I ask because I have just been trying to use Twitter via Chromium on a
Raspberry Pi 2 running Raspbian and Twitter was unusable. Half the tweet could
be typed before any characters became visible and clicks within the text would
take a while to move 
the cursor.
>>
>> So what do you guys think about how fast a 4GB RPi 4 would be in comparison?
>>
>
> Hi I've just tried using a Pi 4 4GB under Raspbian. The answer is that
> whilst it is undoubtedly very impressive it isn't good enough for a
> general purpose desktop.
>
>
> The good:
>
> * Chromium browsing not featuring video was good. Perhaps a bit slow but
> not annoyingly so.
> * vlc could play x264 video perfectly at 1080p, at about 5% cpu.
> * Generally apps/windows opened at an OK speed.
>
> The bad:
>
> * vlc was poor at playing x265 at 1080p, jerky, 50% cpu and about 30%
> dropped frames.
> * Youtube video was awful, slow, jerky. As were other, popular, free
> video Streaming sites.
> * Amazon Video wouldn't play at all due to chromium not being a
> supported browser.
> * LibreOffice Calc gave painfully slow scrolling, on a sheet with 365
> rows and 26 columns.
>
> General comments. The main problem seems to be applications lacking
> support for hardware video decoding and maybe also a lack of GPU
> support. In particular Chromium doesn't seem to be doing video efficiently.
>
> So I will use this Pi as a server rather than a desktop.
>

You mentioning video reminds me of talk of running an HTPC on earlier
Raspberry Pi models. If they worked, maybe they didn't use them to view
Youtube and the like, of course.

Thanks for the above info. I wanted to move to a 4k desktop when I saw
the RPi4 announcement. For various reasons I will look into the idea of
mini-itx that Martin mentioned but will maybe come back to the RPi4 for
an HTPC front end to a MythTV system - at least at up to 1080p.


--
James Harris

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